11 thoughts on “The last Trump …”

I should hastily add that Trump is not what I would call my dream candidate (that would be Gough Whitlam mixed with a dash of his former tutor, Enoch Powell). Merely that Trump is not a derpish wing-nut in the way that term is bandied about by Left-wing bloggers. He may have any number of anti-science ideas but these are NOT the basis of his popularity in the electorate or the cause of Establishment hostility. They are his personal idiosyncrasies, just the Donald being the Donald, don’t pay it any mind.

I’m sorry if I put your nose out of joint with my “gratuitious insult”. Don’t take it personally, I’m like that with everyone. I will try to be nicer in future. FWIW I think your economic and ecologic analysis is the best in show and will help pave the way to a New Jerusalem.

Since I didn’t write anything new beyond the headline, I left my meaning ambiguous. It’s primarily not about Trump himself, but about the implosion of the Republican party he represents and has accelerated. That includes the normalization of things like birtherism and anti-vax, previously considered as disqualifying for any serious candidate.

It is perhaps like Australia, another nation that has outlived its formation and formative structures. It’s institutions, initially developed as a compromise mechanism in the interests of a small dominant class initially seeking to avoid overt class warfare, were infiltrated and eventually captured by these as the mode of capitalism changed from industrial to financial/commercial and control of the common wealth slipped through the fingers of a consensus society that lost control of its finances to an oligarchy intent on obscuring the change and hiding the reality.

Politics became a spectacle unrelated to the actual state of society, and political parties turned into shopfronts for this innane and diversionary anti-politics so well represented by people like Trump, where the big non issue, apart from trying to bag a reformist Pope this week, has been the removal of the US’s first Muslim Subversive President (IA).

(sigh) What can you say about the leading Republican candidate who is a multiply-bankrupt peak capitalist trying to buy the Presidency while simultaneously maligning women, latinos, plus while wearing a strange orange creature across his scalp. Makes you wonder … I’ve been asked by folk outside the U.S. “Why do Americans need over a year to carry out a Presidential Election?” It’s ridiculous I admit, but it does give everyone time to become familiar with the candidates. Also, of course, judging by foreign interest, there’s the entertainment factor …

In the spirit of the last sentence, every 4 years I’m tempted to switch my party affiliation to Republican just to do some perverse mischief in the Presidential primaries. (not really)

Outside this alternative reality, the United States is a country dominated by a strong Christian religiosity. Within it, Christians are a persecuted minority.

Outside the system, President Obama—whatever his policy ­errors—is a figure of imposing intellect and dignity. Within the system, he’s a pitiful nothing, unable to speak without a teleprompter, an affirmative-action ­phony doomed to inevitable defeat.

Outside the system, social scientists worry that the U.S. is hardening into one of the most rigid class societies in the Western world, in which the children of the poor have less chance of escape than in France, Germany, or even England. Inside the system, the U.S. remains (to borrow the words of Senator Marco Rubio) “the only place in the world where it doesn’t matter who your parents were or where you came from.”

In the episode ‘Bart To The Future’, Bart receives an allegedly prophetic vision of the future in which Lisa has become President (she describes herself as the first straight female President), and reference is made to the disastrous effects of the policies of the preceding Trump administration, which decided to ‘invest in children’ with a ‘Balanced Breakfast’ program and a ‘Midnight Basketball’ program, resulting in a generation of ultra-strong super-criminals who don’t need to sleep.